Growing apart together

All shared out: the bearded figure of Chris Layton, centre, and fellow community members of Grimstone Manor

Lesley Gillilan

12:01AM BST 17 Jun 2006

Grimstone Manor, in Devon, was the perfect setting for an experiment in community living. What happened next? Lesley Gillilan reports

The owners of Grimstone Manor describe themselves as a community. They are nine adults, sharing a rambling, Georgian mansion and 20 acres of Devon, on the western fringe of Dartmoor. The house is run as a Centre for Transformation and Change, offering residential courses in activities such as yoga, shamanism and psychotherapy.

When I arrived, a group of inmates were doing qi gong (a type of tai-chi exercise) among the beanbags in the conference room. I was shown around by Sandy Bayley, a 36-year-old former legal secretary, sporting a nose-ring and coloured dreadlocks. "Would you like cow's milk or soya in your tea?" she asks. Lunch is vegetarian (baked peppers stuffed with chick peas). There was a vegan option.

Stereotypical alternative culture aside, I couldn't help but be seduced by Grimstone. And not just because the house is vast and the grounds are magnificent, but because the community's enthusiasm is infectious. It quickly becomes clear that the Grimstone community comprises worthy and unpretentious members who are hard-working people.

"We are not at all hippy-dippy," says former teacher John Neville, who joined the community with his wife, Jean, two years ago. Grimstone errs on the side of middle-aged, and it's definitely middle-class. "A lot of people would regard it as staid," he adds. Like all members, the Nevilles bought into the venture (£100,000 was the current going rate). They saw it as a form of active retirement.

Grimstone is for sale, and by the time I left, I was wondering whether I could rustle up enough friends to raise the £2 million asking price. It would cost nine people a lot more than £100,000 each, but it has huge potential. It comes with 13 bedrooms, an attic flat, a self-contained mews with five small apartments (Grimstone accommodates up to 40 paying guests), an indoor swimming pool, woodlands, a walled kitchen garden, and a long, private drive through fields of sheep.

OK, so the house is a little institutionalised (dormitory bedrooms, bland decor and an industrial kitchen), and the mews has a whiff of bedsit-land. But the setting is to die for. When I visited two weeks ago, the gardens were a blaze of colour; all azaleas and house-height rhododendrons.

Grimstone's sellers hope that their buyer will continue to run the centre; and they want to sell the property as a ready-made community with a built-in business. But even they would have to admit that there are downsides to communal life.

Grimstone was founded by the community's majority share-holder, 75-year-old Chris Layton, in 1990. "I was part of a group in London who used to meet and meditate and talk about our spiritual development," he says. "We had been interested in the idea of starting a community for a long time." He visited Grimstone, already an established residential training centre, to attend a healing workshop, and discovered it was on the market. The mews house next door came up for sale around the same time. Chris's six-person, fledgling community bought both properties and moved in.

"It felt quite magical, almost euphoric, when it started," he says. "But it was intense and challenging, particularly as everyone had to sell their homes and start again in a new place." They lived in the mews, which was then one living space, with a shared kitchen. "Living in a community is a bit like being married to six or seven people," says Chris. "Some of us found that quite difficult." Most of the challenges, he says, are to do with relationships, people breaking up, or getting together. Members came and went, and Grimstone followed its own path.

Today, 16 years later, Chris is the only surviving original member. He and three others have moved into a nearby property. Others live in the mews, since divided into self-contained apartments (though most people eat and socialise in a big family kitchen in the house). Only the basic ethos and co-operative system remains roughly the same.

It goes something like this: having invested a capital sum, and agreed to contribute energy into running the centre and maintaining the house and grounds, each member gets paid by the hour (based on the minimum wage).

Pay is low, but members get full board, plenty of free time and a bonus from any profit at the end of each year. The income comes from fee-paying guests, and from leasing Grimstone's pasture to a local farmer. Last year's turnover was about £220,000 - not much, when you have a property this size to run.

When the sale goes through, each member will get a share of the money; they will also benefit from some capital gain. Not as much, perhaps, as they would have gained as independent freeholders. But they don't seem to care. "People who come here don't want to be run-of the-mill," says John. "Their lives are not tied into bricks and mortar. It's about quality of life."

So why is the Grimstone community disbanding? According to the estate agent's details, "several key members have decided to move on", hence the sale. But the reasons are more complex. Not only has the constant coming and going of members destabilised the community, but also the membership is getting older (most are over 55).

"A true working community would be unsustainable if there were too many old people," says Chris. "And we haven't been able to attract enough young people. They want to come, but they don't have the capital to invest."

Grimstone could be sold as a family home or a hotel. There is a only a slim chance that it will survive as a live-and-work community in its present form.

A great pity, according to Sandy, the youngest of Grimstone's joint owners, and one of the most reluctant to leave. "This is the best thing I've ever done," she tells me. "You come here, you find yourself, build your confidence, change spiritually and move on."

What will Sandy and her husband, Dan, a former electronics engineer, do now? Why, run a veggie-burger business, of course. "We'd never go back to our old life."